I recently read Beowulf for the fourth or fifth time in my senior English majors colloquium, and several aspects of the narrative provoked some thoughts in my tired grey cells. Specifically, what my professor, Craig Williamson, called the “sense that things are winding down.” If you’ve read Beowulf, and if you’ve read anything by Tolkien (a rather important Anglo Saxon scholar), you probably have an idea of what that means.

Often present in Anglo Saxon poetry and narrative is the sense that an end (or change) is coming. Beowulf has been called a heroic elegiac poem, and the elegiac tone comes through rather strongly. Part of that is due to the upcoming Ragnarok, the ultimate battle between men and gods and giants. Ragnarok looms, conceptually, throughout many of the poems extant from that time period.

The end of Beowulf is rather profoundly wound down. The hero has fallen, and his demise heralds the end of the Geats (sorry if that spoiled the story for anyone). The remaining Geats, who fled before the dragon, sing a dirge for Beowulf, and I certainly feel the remnants of the story slipping through my fingers.

Lines 2457-2459 of Burton Raffel’s translation are, for me, the most illustrative of the sense of winding down. I also find them the most beautiful lines of the poem.

So riders and ridden
Sleep in the ground; pleasure is gone,
The harp is silent, and hope is forgotten.

J.R.R. Tolkien seized upon the sense of things winding down when he wrote the Lord of the Rings. The narrative builds to the Battle of Pelenor Fields and the battle before the Black Gate. There is an aspect of building up, as well, but there are key elements thrown into the narrative that make me feel, acutely, the sense of age and decay.

One of the most important, Anglo Saxon aspects of Middle Earth is the constant presence of crumbled civilizations. The Argonath, the crumbled statues, the barrows, it all hints at something more. Not only does it make the world deeper, but it also creates a bit of nostalgia and it weaves an elegy into the narrative. There is a profound sense of age that pervades Middle Earth, and Tolkien uses it well. The end of the story feels like a giant sigh, held for three thousand years and then released all at once.

It’s the sort of thing that I’d love to use in my own storytelling and world building. A good sense of age and history makes a narrative come alive. Have you done this sort of thing? Share!

I’m more about things beginning, at least when it comes to my games. If the heroes are the last gasp of a mythic era, then it doesn’t really matter what they do since it will all fade into the mists of legends anyway. But if they’re the start of a new era, then every action they take is magnified in history.

Yep – did this all the time with a couple of 2E games. I used three dead cultures as the basis for one campaign -an orcish horde modelled on Charlemagne’s warriors, a lawful evil empire based on Rome corrupted by devils and barbarian tombs based on Neolithic tribes. One player got to the point where she could read the barbarian runes I put on handwritten handouts. This also let me use elements from the different cultures in the same dungeons as the orcs built on the foundations of the evil empire and looted bits from the barbarian structures.

Nice! I like your approach. I recently ran a Pathfinder campaign where the main city (for our story, anyway) was built on the ruins of three previous cities, but their origins were lost to time. Made for some interesting sewer adventures.

My last game was set in Candle, a homebrew 4e world. The premise was that there had been an apocalypse, and now there was magic and monsters and a vastly decreased human population. The game was set about 20 years on, meaning all but one of the party were born after the apocalypse. (This led to things like us having an elf ranger who had never seen trees, since all the ones in the area had burned to ash when the world ended.)

There were still remnants of modern technology here and there, and no great powerful magic artifacts since magic had only been around for a couple decades. Instead of ruined temples, there were ruined subways and skyscrapers. The oldest dragon was 20 years old. Even the gods were struggling to establish themselves.

I’m not sure who first came up with it, but it gradually became apparent to all of us that this world would eventually evolve into a typical medieval fantasy world – but one greatly shaped by the PCs’ actions.

Every thing they did, they did through that lens. The cleric of the Raven Queen redeems a tribe of goblins? Goblins in the future are all nocturnal and hate undead. The ranger buries a dragon’s corpse in an enchanted grove, fertilizing the trees there with its blood? Three centuries on, the Dragon Grove would be known as a place of great power.

And so on. It really affected a lot of what the PCs did, because they were always thinking about their legacy.